After four months of very hard work, the training period ended and the air force took a week off. We decided that instead of taking a week of leave, we would brush up a little more. We asked one of the senior squadrons to host us and prepare a course for advanced students. After a week of training at Ramat-David at the Hammers, we all went back south for another bout of hard work.
THE ORANGE TAILS BEGAN to take shape. The American embargo was lifted, and the inferiority complex of the “midget squadron” began to go away. We waited anxiously for our new aircraft, and indeed at the end of March 1972 they began arriving from St. Louis, flown by test pilots from the factory. They landed at Hatzor, and we went there to bring them home. I took the first one, tail no. 51, and flew it to Hatzerim. My commander, Colonel Bareket, was a full partner in the greatness of the moment and sat behind me as weapons officer. No. 51 was clean and lovely and smelled like a brand-new car. Bareket proposed that we buzz the base, but I preferred to land the new aircraft carefully and taxi it slowly, holding it like a newborn baby, into my squadron’s no. 2 hangar, just prepared for it. Following this flight I noticed with a slight surprise that I also began calling the aircraft not by its foreign name, Phantom, but by its Hebrew name, Hammer.
Still, I didn’t love the Hammer. I was repelled by its dinosaur profile, but I caught myself casting sideways looks at it. Something began to drop inside me, like a coin making its way down in a machine. I was almost offended when Briar and his mechanics climbed the 51 on the same day with their dirty shoes and began taking parts from it and peeping into its guts. Briar and his second-in-command, Lt. Mike Lott, noticed my expression, and the next day every ladder in the squadron had rugs for wiping our shoes.
New aircraft arrived monthly, and soon we could hand the original six back to their original owners. We became an independent fighter squadron, proud of our new, shiny aircraft, and of our squadron’s emblem displayed on their wide, low tails. We painted those tails orange, like the color of the setting sun I saw at dusk from the windows of my office, sparkling at me on the barren Negev hills. We adopted the name Knights of the South.
WE CONTINUED TO WORK very hard. We already had ten aircraft, so we invited First’s Mirages for a week of dogfight training. We were beginning to fly the Phantom the right way. We practiced with the variety of weapons and munitions the big aircraft could carry. We started competing in fast turnaround competitions—how fast could we arm the whole fleet with bombs and missiles and get the squadron on a war footing—and the aircrew team headed by the muscular Shachar competed against the munitions officer, Lieutenant Jimmy with his Indians. The Friday ritual was set, and everybody—pilots and mechanics together—got together to wash down the hangars and shine up the aircraft. This was the prelude to our Saturday off.
More and more aircraft arrived, we opened more hangars, and new air and ground crews joined us. Everyone who came of his own free will made me happy. A real fighting unit settled down around me, one that required no more marketing. The senior commanders of the air force didn’t know it yet, but the young pilots already had a sense of what was happening here, and suddenly there were people knocking on our squadron’s door. The two-seat, two-engine Phantom doubled everything, and at the beginning of 1973 my Orange ceased to be a small, intimate unit and became big and noisy like her three older sisters. But the hard beginnings had left us all our own culture of noncompromising insistence on clarity, perfection, and cleanliness. This culture became part of us, and remained even as men came and left.
I spent most of my waking hours in the squadron or in the air. Ali carried the burden of our home by herself, and in addition she worked in Beer-Sheva and was studying to be a librarian. We had no private car, and every morning she would stand at the base gate to hitchhike to town, and at noon on the way back at the military hitchhiking point at the southern gate of Beer-Sheva. I suspected that the operations clerks were hiding from me that on rainy days they sent the squadron car secretly to pick her up. I preferred not to know. When we met at night I would tell her about my Phantom shop that was so loud that I was hearing buzzing in my ears all the time, and when I escaped to my cockpit, a navigator was making even more noise. My stories amused her, and the laughing brought little Noah to us, a baby girl after two boys. Back then there was still no way to find out the sex of the fetus, and when a girl appeared we both thought we would faint from joy.
It was a hard time but we were very happy.
AND I STILL COULDN’T LOVE the Phantom.
I already knew how to control it and manage its clumsy performance, and each time I took the controls in the cockpit I repressed my revulsion and reveled in the efficiency of teaming with the navigator. The Phantom was a very interesting aircraft, and great for ground attacks and bombing missions, and it had all those wonderful computers, but at nights I would sometimes wake up from a dream and ask Ali how we got here, and how could I have traded my noble steed for a hippopotamus?
The Phantom clicked with me only in mid-1972, after I had collected some two hundred flight hours in it. We were on maneuvers against the Fighting First. In one of five repeated sorties practicing advanced aerial combat against Mirages at low level, suddenly something happened inside my cockpit. This was a very intimate thing, as if somebody had strummed the bass string, and I froze and listened very carefully, lest I lose it, while the fight went on all around us. Then I tried very gently to open more, and the Phantom heard and responded, smooth as butter.
I stopped idolizing Mirages, and they became just good models of the MiG-21. In that flight’s debriefing I heard Epstein from the First, who had keen senses and a sharp eye, say, “The Orange Tails have become dangerous.”
Though I was never as sure of the Phantom as of the Mirage before him, he had shown me that he also knew the game.
I DON’T WANT TO DWELL on the next year, so let’s skip the training and the deployments to Refidim and Ophir in the southern part of the Sinai. Let’s skip the stories from family housing, the parties, the picnics, the kids, the women, the friendships, and even various operational sorties.
Let’s only mention the failed attempt to intercept the futuristic MiG-25, which crossed the Sinai Peninsula at untouchable altitude and speed, like a space satellite, to take our pictures for the Egyptians. This MiG was a secret Soviet aircraft with hypercruise performance, and it flew much faster and higher than anything our Phantom could dream of, but we climbed toward it intending to make an approach at sixty thousand feet and launch radar-guided missiles at it from there. We saw its vapor trail coming toward us on our climb to position, but then we had an oxygen malfunction, and Manoff and I had to stop our climb halfway, choking, and the MiG passed high over our heads, painting a white trail in the sky. We landed at Ophir disgusted and disappointed, the unlaunched missiles still hanging under our aircraft.
JUST A LINE ABOUT MY OLD friends from the thirty-first flight school class. Goldie was completing a stint commanding a Skyhawk squadron and designated to take over the Bats Phantoms at Tel Nof; Or Yoeli, who flew my wing that stormy night, and now was commanding the neighboring Skyhawk squadron in Hatzerim; and Uri and Shula Sheani, who lived next door, with four kids. From all Sheani’s capabilities, the air force decided to use his talents in orienteering . He became the commander of the preparation stage for flight school. And let’s not forget Asher Snir, who had begun to get me into interesting discussions over “space-time” and “the psychophysical problem.” Snir was using these discussions as an excuse to come and convince me to vacate the Orange Tails for him, since his time was running out. For me, well, it was just an honor to have someone like him wanting to come down here, in spite of the desert dust.
And for the same reason, to cut to the chase, let us cut short the arguments against “Baban”—the best of all the instructors—who vehemently opposed my habit of washing out of my squadron whomever I didn’t approve of.
“Teach them, you bastard!” he would yell at me. Baban had been my flight instructor on Meteors in 1960, the first jet I ever flew, and his beautiful, long-fingered hands manipulated the stick with such adroitness that very few could match him in a dogfight. I thought he was great, but I remembered the lesson Gen. Moti Hod taught me. I was expecting a war, and not about to let my squadron become dysfunctional, as I had seen at the Fighting First. I didn’t intend to compromise on the quality of men when I was building a squadron from scratch. I agreed to accept only the good ones, and kept washing out anybody I didn’t feel right about. War was coming.
